The Republic of Dissent

Much needed crisis

Words I munched on last weekend from Norman Davies via the Financial Times:

There is a peculiar absence of dynamic politicians in Europe today. Ten or 15 years ago, I said that Europe would need a really serious crisis for things to be put on the right track. I don’t know how bad it’s got to get before people are driven into changing things. (...) If nothing is done, then disintegration could follow. But I suspect that things will deteriorate, and then some sort of solution will be thought of, and then the European momentum will begin to grow again – after a crisis of several years

Foresight and narrow-mindedness

Fraser Nelson over at the Spectator's Coffee House can't step out his way to see the forest through the trees:

In Egypt, the army look like they are settling in. If there is regime change, I doubt that whoever takes over will be pro-Western (the crowds will likely remember that the tear gas used on them was dispensed in canisters saying “Made in USA”). The grim fact remains that Iran is racing towards the bomb, and if they succeed then the Sunni world – in Saudi Arabia and Cairo – will likely follow suit. I’d love to see some wind of change blowing through Arab street, but I still fear that we’re heading for a multi-polar nuclear standoff in the only part of the world which is mad enough to use nuclear weapons. I do hope I’m wrong.

The trouble with Nelson isn't that he may be wrong or can be right, but rather that he sees Egypt not as a country like his own or any 'normal' one (I would use Western, but I don't believe in the existence of the West or in the division of the world between the West and the rest). Egypt to Nelson is a means to an end or worst a part of a jungle whose happenings must not be allowed to disturb the peace and stability of the 'modern world.'  The issue isn't about what the events of Egypt means for the rest of the world, but about what they mean for Egyptians. It is alarming to realize that too many including the prominent members of the Obama administration haven't learned from the greatest mistakes of the past. Doing so would have taught them that tolerating wrongs to avoid the worst never works in international politics for the simple reason that it legitimates the worst by delegitimating the moral arguments against it.

Thus, tying to the fall of Mubarak to the nuclearisation of Iran and of the whole middle east is like tying the fall of Louis XVI to the rise of anarchy in Europe and of the reign of terror. History isn't gastronomy and Egyptians are thus neither ingredients nor slaves of a predictable or controllable future.

David Brooks's America

The fact that David Brooks feels optimistic about the future of America makes pensive because he is not only more often wrong than right, but things narrowly about too many issues:

In sum, the U.S. is on the verge of a demographic, economic and social revival, built on its historic strengths. The U.S. has always been good at disruptive change. It’s always excelled at decentralized community-building. It’s always had that moral materialism that creates meaning-rich products. Surely a country with this much going for it is not going to wait around passively and let a rotten political culture drag it down.

I, too, feel optimistic about America's future. However, reading Brooks makes me realize that too many Americans as educated as him live in a bubble. They have no real experience outside of the United States, which is worrisome because the world isn't a plus size America.

Failing sanctions and Iran

Distressing fact from James Joyner's post on the ineffectiveness of the regime of sanctions against Iran:

America's regime of sanctions on Iran are ineffective but we're likely to see more of them.

What's the point of sanctions if it's known that they don't work? Well, it is to give the appearance of action, resilience, and of strength when as the sanctions against Iraq for example showed that they always lead to the inevitable: confrontation or acceptance of the feared outcome. The US is using sanctions to gain time in the hope that the situation will either change in Iran, i.e. another revolution, or on the world stage that would force, Russia  to join the US and its allies to form a block to have Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions. My opinion is that neither possibility is likely.

The imperial reflex and the post 9/11 world

Pankaj Mishra argues convincingly, I have to say, that the United States and the "West" still have imperial reflexes, which are preventing them from acknowledging the realities of the post 9/11 world, an era where the East and the rest of the world are no longer scared of them and have their own ideas about how things are going to be. Sugary excerpt:

Decolonisation seems to have dented little the sense of superiority that since 1945 has made American leaders in particular consistently underestimate the intensity of nationalist feeling in Asia and Africa. In proposing cash bribes for the "moderate" Taliban, the Obama administration reminds one of FDR's bright idea about the original inhabitants of Palestine: "What about the Arabs?" he once asked the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. "Can't that be settled with a little baksheesh?"(...)The Chinese, Indians, Iranians and other emerging powers too have an idea of what they owe to themselves: the richness of the world that the west first claimed for itself. But while getting what they want, they won't claim the sanction of a superior morality and civilisation. Indeed, the long and appalling history of European hypocrisy in Asia and Africa may be why Beijing dispenses altogether with talk of Chinese values as its strikes deals with nasty regimes in Africa, and why even democratic India keeps mum about the advantages of regular elections as it tries to offset Chinese influence over Burma's military despots. 

Reading Mishra's article forces me to ask myself whether America's most influential mark on the world was that it made it so cool and often so stylish to be a hegemon that now every country wants to be one and to exercise power in the same way. I'm coming to the realization that the post 9/11 world is one with a bunch of countries who have fallen in love, whether they want to be admit it or not with the American style of power, even as they resents it when it affects them. America is John Wayne and we know that there was a time when every man, no matter where he came from, wanted to be John Wayne even when he hated the fact that he was killing "Indians" and shooting from the hip without much finesse, sophistication or awareness of the sensibilities of others.

The dead ends of history

The Economist has a great article on the ex-Communist Europeans countries and the fact that they are leaving their History behind as they move forward:

For the past 20 years, the countries of this region have been involved in what might be called "therapeutic historiography": tearing up old communist propaganda versions of history, and writing new ones. That has been an exhilarating, messy and sometimes disconcerting process. For Estonians and Latvians, for example, it meant the chance to honour those (heroes or victims, but not villains) who fought against the impending Soviet occupation in 1944-45. Yet many outsiders see these men as no more than Nazi collaborators: they wore uniforms of the SS, the epitome of wartime evil, and served alongside some war criminals. Context and comparison (far more Russians than Balts fought on Hitler's side) become irrelevant.
Slovaks and Croats want to de-demonise their wartime republics (Nazi puppet states from one viewpoint, a snatched breath of national regeneration from another). Germans and Jews, once seemingly vanished from the region, have emerged from the shadows (and from abroad), with their own unhappy memories that undermine the self-righteousness of both Communist and ethno-nationalist versions of history.
(...) Now central and eastern Europe may be joining the club of the ahistorical and apathetic. Historical rows are already the exception, not the rule. Poland is the signal example.

Usually, when the past is a source of shame or rather cannot be one of pride, it dies for those whose memory is too fresh to reinvent it. It is a lot easier to become ahistorical and even apathetic when you believe that the present is better than the past and than the future will be even better. The point is that former Communist countries for the most part feel that they are a lot to look forward to and that they may even be the future of Europe to make an indirect reference to Rumsfeld's provocative statement that there was an old and a new Europe.

Frightening stats

Just reading this scares me:

There are 41 million girls around the world who should be in primary school all week, but aren't, the Department for International Development says. At least 20 million of them are, like Abigail, in sub-Saharan Africa.
In Ghana, 91% of boys, but only 79% of girls finish primary school. By the time they complete junior high school – for 12- to 15-year-olds – 65% of boys and just 54% of girls are still in lessons, says the lobby group the Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition.

This reality is going to be very difficult to change as long as people keep using traditions and the so-called absolute divinity of "ancestral" norms to justify the unjustifiable and the inexcusable.

The negatives of positive thinking

I agree with this:

(...) positive thinking has duped America into a collective delusion and is now spreading its pernicious tentacles around the world.

An awaited return to traditions

No Comment necessary to this pompous assertion by Terence Blacker who seems inebriated by his beliefs in the absolutism of the laws of nature concerning gender:

The idea that, in spite of feminism, the emancipation of the market and a more grown-up attitude among most men to domestic life, an increasing number of woman now yearn to be at home and are pining for a male breadwinner is difficult to take too seriously.

Barbarity is the future

I love predictions of the coming of the "Apocalypse" or "dark times" especially when they are well formulated as it is this by Chris Hedges:

We stand on the cusp of one of the bleakest periods in human history when the bright lights of a civilization blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity. The elites have successfully convinced us that we no longer have the capacity to understand the revealed truths presented before us or to fight back against the chaos caused by economic and environmental catastrophe. As long as the mass of bewildered and frightened people, fed images that permit them to perpetually hallucinate, exist in this state of barbarism, they may periodically strike out with a blind fury against increased state repression, widespread poverty and food shortages. But they will lack the ability and self-confidence to challenge in big and small ways the structures of control. The fantasy of widespread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that – a fantasy.
My analysis comes close to the analysis of many anarchists. But there is a crucial difference. The anarchists do not understand the nature of violence. They grasp the extent of the rot in our cultural and political institutions, they know they must sever the tentacles of consumerism, but they naïvely believe that it can be countered with physical forms of resistance and acts of violence. There are debates within the anarchist movement – such as those on the destruction of property – but once you start using plastic explosives, innocent people get killed. And when anarchic violence begins to disrupt the mechanisms of governance, the power elite will use these acts, however minor, as an excuse to employ disproportionate and ruthless amounts of force against real and suspected agitators, only fueling the rage of the dispossessed.

The problem with Chris Hedges is that he is too "religious" and therefore, my intent here is not to be demeaning, he believes in the greater purpose, in the grand design and that the future has to be bleak if the present looks a certain way because catastrophes are predetermined by the existence of certain elements/factors. I don't believe that. I'm a constant pessimistically  optimist.  I don't believe that the Dark ages are coming back or that barbarity is the future, I believe that the future doesn't look good, but I don't believe that we ever go back in times, which isn't a comfort for what may be coming might be worse for it is true that progressive isn't continuous. The interesting answer is of course, what happens when it stops. In short, my point is that all points of history are potentially point zero, a period when the unimaginable can happen and it can all end. The good news is that since everything is permissible (yes, God is dead) even though that does not mean that nothing is forbidden as always added Camus, everything, including the best and the worst, is still possible.

The democratic pretext and the need to slay the dragon

Samir Amin on what he calls the "new democratic discourse" of Global imperialism:

The new "democratic" discourse thus bore its fruits.  It seemed sufficiently convincing for "left-wing" opinion in Europe to support it.  This was so, not only for the electoral left (the socialist parties) but also those with a more radical tradition, of which the communist parties were the heir.  With "eurocommunism" the consensus became general.

The dominant classes of the imperialist Triad learnt lessons from their victory.  They thus decided to continue this strategy of centering the debate on the "democratic question."  China is not reproached for having opened up its economy to the outside world, but because its policies are managed by the Communist Party.  No account is taken of the social achievements of Cuba, unequalled in the whole of Latin America, but its one-party system is constantly stigmatized.  The same discourse is even leveled against Putin's Russia.
Is the triumph of democracy the real objective of this strategy?  One has to be very naïve to think so.  The only aim is to impose on recalcitrant countries the "market economy," open and integrated into the so-called liberal world system.  This is in reality imperialistic, its purpose being to reduce these countries to the status of dominated peripheries of the system.  This is an objective that, once achieved, becomes an obstacle to the progress of democracy in the victimized countries and is in no way an advance in response to the "democratic question."
The chances of democratic progress in the countries that practiced "actually existing socialism" (at least at the beginning) would have been much greater, in the medium term if not immediately, if the dialectic of social struggles had been left to develop on its own, opening up the possibility of surpassing the limits of "actually existing socialism" (which had, moreover, been deformed by at least partial adherence to the liberal economic opening) to reach the "end of the tunnel."
In actual fact, the "democratic" theme is only invoked against countries that do not want to open up to the globalized liberal economy.

Amin just proves, once again,  that most are still fighting the same old battle even if it has no chance or rather has never proven that it will have fruitful results. Amin is his own way a Fukuyamist. What I'm trying to say that Amin isn't wrong, but that he has a Marxist mindset that leads to another soft of moral paternalism and that leads to not laissez-faire, but to laissez-aller because people stop believe in actions if they do not  lead to the revolution or to other grand design. Amin is his own way a Fukuyamist who sees democracy solely as an ideological weapon.. Thus, my point is simply that at some point, those who believe that most of what is happening in the world is influenced or the consequences of Imperialist forces are going to have stop going to the poorly xhurch of victimization and show some spine by slaying the evil dragon.

Sniffing the ashes of Communism

Sugary excerpt from Enda O'Doherty's review of Uncivil Society by Stephen Kotkin in the Dublin Review of books:

The chief practical flaw of communism, however, has not been the absence of public-spirited individuals, or even the failure of Socialist Man to develop into a perfect being, but the persistence of the need for repression. Many individuals, whether fortunately or unfortunately, have a tendency to put themselves and their families first in any economic calculation. They may also have a little room in their hearts for their neighbours, or even “society” ‑ but it will not normally be the best room. Such people of course, particularly if they are stubborn, stand in the way of creating a classless society and may have be dealt with, through expulsion, intimidation, imprisonment or, in extreme cases (or just to be sure), liquidation. These measures will be carried out by a new class of servants of the regime, whose most prized quality will be loyalty, and who will be decently rewarded for that loyalty. It would be equally foolish to entrust administration of the state’s industrial or agricultural enterprises or indeed of its education system or entertainment channels to people who because of their known attitudes or class backgrounds are unlikely to be completely reliable. Here too loyalty, rather than drive or intelligence, will be the key requirements. And thus we are well on the way to a creating a society where, in the analysis of its most virulent opponents, stupidity rises to the top (but perhaps we should be a little sceptical of that reading too: extreme stupidity is unlikely to make it quite to the top in any society). Excessively stupid or not, we will have a non-performing society, and one where the abuse of power is routine and goes unpunished.

 (...) The collapse of the communist states has also, more or less, entailed the collapse of communism as an ideology and of communist parties and with that the disappearance of the idea that capitalist society could be destroyed or replaced. Social democracy has (at best) a meliorist programme; Trotskyism, which retains a certain ability to recruit among the young, is politically little more than a joke (though at times an annoying one). There are many people nevertheless whom the triumph of capitalism (seen in its ability to survive politically virtually unchallenged even at a time of severe systemic crisis) does not fill with unalloyed joy. Where communism wants to give you butcher’s shops called “Meat”, capitalism gives you five thousand brands of shampoo (not to mention talk radio). It seems, however, that the only practical choice is between bearing this idiocy cheerfully and engaging in a form of personal inward withdrawal. If capitalism ever does collapse it will have been due to an inability to master its own anarchic tendencies. And we may well like even less what we get instead.

What I find fascinating is that although Communism (and I believe Socialism) is dead, it's still very much alive in people's mind. The reason for this fact is that Neoliberalism gave it, willingly in my opinion, a new legitimacy in order to create new monsters to slay and to make the perpetual point that Fukuyama was right and that we are indeed living the end of history since even the most brutal regimes believe in some form of the market. Unlike Alain Badiou and others who are living in the past in order to create the possibility of a new future, I don't believe that history is solely about repetitions (I have Hannah Arendt and René Char to thank for that conviction) or continuity and that it is impossible to create something new without  sniffing some of the ashes of Communism by trying to perfect its old model or trying to humanize it or perfect it. I'm coming to the conclusion with some regrets that the relevance of Communism or of even socialism is a proof that our times has run out of imagination, at least in the political sphere and that explains what it is focusing either on fear, the old, the past or simply and more alarmingly in my view fluff.  At some point, I hope somebody of influence will simply stop the discussion and say in more convincing manner than Walter Mondale in 1984, "Where is the beef?"

Sarkozy, Haïti, the past and reparations

Michelle Faul in the Globe and Mail on Sarkozy's visit to Haïti :

The trip brings Mr. Sarkozy to an island where, French officials acknowledge, fascination with things French duels with strong, lingering resentments.
One official close to the French presidency, briefing reporters in Paris on condition of anonymity, hinted that France is not deaf to calls for reparations, calling Mr. Sarkozy's visit “an occasion to show that France is mobilizing to give Haitians control of their destiny and pay past debts.”
France has already said it was cancelling all of Haiti's 56 million euro debt to Paris.
In 1825, crippled by the U.S.-led international embargo that was enforced by French warships, Haiti agreed to pay France 150 million francs in compensation for the lost “property” — including slaves — of French plantation owners.
By comparison, France sold the United States its immensely larger Louisiana Territory in 1803 for just 60 million francs. The amount for Haiti was later lowered to 90 million gold francs.
Haiti did not finish paying the debilitating debt — which was swollen by massive interest payments to French and American banks — until 1947.

The problem that I have with Faul's article is that it emphasizes the past as if it was the sole determinant of  the present and the future, by making it so heavy, and dark that the inevitable conclusion  becomes that it is impossible to escape a history of poverty and the future cannot be radiant or less obscure if there aren't reparations and repentance from the culprits. Haitians must allow their past, their history to die even though the world doesn't seem to want to allow them to do so. They must do so not to become amnesic, but to refuse to carry a history so heavy that it can only lead to the conclusion that their country is a forsaken place, that they are powerless and that to the contrary of every other human being they are condemned to poverty instead being condemned to be free. To come back to Sarkozy, I hope against previous experience that he resists the temptation to grandstand and to take on new causes by advocating huge and doomed to fail ideas. France doesn't have to cleanse its sins in Haïti , it only has to do the right thing and to help Haitians help themselves. The answer isn't more charity or guilt, but practical and yet so simple solutions that place Haitians at the center of everything, by acknowledging that they are in charge of the destiny of their country.

Greece and the integration question

Interesting stuff from Norman Tebbit on Greece, the Euro, Brussels, the European Union:

Gradually, bit by bit, the Greeks and the Germans are discovering that while they have a currency in common, they have absolutely no common economic policy.(...) Already, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, leaders of the member states who really matter in the Eurozone, are dictating instructions to the Greek government – but they are utterly unaccountable to the Greek people. The Greeks are, of course, responsible for their own predicament, but their masters in Brussels also bear a heavy responsibility for having misled them into the trap of membership of the euro and knowingly allowed the Greek government to falsify its statistics to qualify for membership.
Now the Greeks cannot afford to stay in the euro and the Germans and French (and indeed to a lesser extent we British) cannot afford to see the Greek economy collapse.
For our masters in Brussels, this is a moment of great danger and of great opportunity. Their solution is simple. Not just a single currency and a single central bank, but a single finance minister administering a single tax and spending system, and a single government across the EU. Without that, either the Eurozone will shrink to a hard core of states around Germany and the Deutschmark will be reborn under the name of the euro, or the euro will cease to be.

I'm starting to wonder whether European monetary integration can continue, successfully, without more European political integration (deepening that is) and whether more vigorous central institutions (The European Central Bank doesn't seem to be enough to fix  crisis.) aren't necessary for Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European council has not only been invisible, but is becoming irrelevant.
Nouriel Roubini has a different take on Greece in the Globe and Mail.

Fukuyamism 2.2

Francis Fukuyama in the Spectator on current events, history, and the future of democracy (hat tip: Hattie Garlick):

I think that even in the wake of the Ukrainian election and other recent reverses, the future of democracy is not so bleak. In the first place, democracy remains, in Amartya Sen’s words, the ‘default’ political condition: ‘While democracy is not yet universally practised, nor indeed universally accepted, in the general climate of world opinion democratic governance has achieved the status of being taken to be generally right.’ Very few people around the world openly profess to admire Putin’s petro-nationalism, or Chavez’s ‘21st-century socialism,’ or Ahmedinejad’s Islamic Republic.
(....)The next phase of global history will be a challenging one, as America and Europe stumble to get back their economic balance. It seems doubtful that either the US or Britain will achieve the degree of growth in the next generation that they did in the previous one. But one of the great advantages of democracy is that it does not depend for its legitimacy on continuing high levels of economic growth, as the Chinese system does.
As we move forward, it is important to keep in mind the simple power of the idea of a government by, for, and of the people. We need to match those high ideals with unglamorous but steady investments in institution-building if liberal democracy is to deliver on its promises.

It is good to see that since The End of History, Fukuyama has become timid about making bold and grand predictions about the future. However, the problem is that he has become so timid that he is no longer original so busy that he is to cleanse his reputation from his original sin, which was to have the arrogance to assert that history had ended, and from the fact that he, maybe in spite of himself, inspired Neoconservatism. To come back to his essay in the Spectator, the problem that I have with it is its shortsightedness and its author's unwillingness to ask the grand question, which is whether societies who are dominated by the market can remain Democratic no in the superficial sense of the world, but in Tocqueville's sense of it. If corporations are people and can greater influence in politics because they have more money, if the electorate's vote is solely based on identity politics,  if not all voices are represented in a representative Democracy, is  such a political system still democratic and can we really ignore its shortcomings by arguing in a Thatcherite and autocratic fashion that there is no alternative? Unfortunately, Fukuyama, in my opinion purposely, offers no answers and furthermore and that is most disappointing, he doesn't even allude to those problems by pretending that the crux of the future legitimacy of democracy is elsewhere.  

Existential questions about the European Union

Interesting stuff from my second favorite law professor Kenneth Anderson on the future of the EU and its lack of a clearly defined political ideology, which impedes cohesion and may put into question its viability:

I am mostly an admirer of the EU and what it has done in many things, starting with the long term transformations in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, to start with, let alone the expansion eastwards.  But that does not lead me to any belief that it has worked out the deep internal contradictions in the political governance project, and less still any view that the EU points the way to some genuinely new kind of governance structure in human affairs.  It might, I suppose — I’m not ruling it out.  But let’s give it, say, a hundred years to see if it has staying power before we draft up too many theories of its historical inevitability.
In any case, how much does it matter? I’m not referring to myself — I mean simply that the Obama administration’s pooh-bahs seem to have written off Europe as the past, Asia is the future.  The irony is that it is precisely on account of striving so desperately, so mightily, to become a Western European democratic socialist state that the Obama administration feels no need any longer to look to Europe.  It has already priced-in internally anything of ideological value Europe might have to offer, on account of the transformations under way in the US.  We’ve now got — thanks to the decension of Bush and the inclension of Obama –anything of value Europe might offer in the way of values, so why pay attention to those losers?  What could Europe possibly teach President Obama about community, fraternite, welfare, socialism, social safety nets, unions, public sector employment, all the rest of the stuff in which Europe ideologically specializes?  This is President Obama, after all — on all of these things, O Europe, you should learn from him.  And from Rahm Emanuel.

I think that Professor Anderson is partly right but fails to realize that the biggest threats to the EU existence are its increasing democratic deficit (the Lisbon Treaty is an example) and its enduring inability to have a common foreign and security policy. As for the increasing disinterest of the Obama administration for Europe, it is, I believe, solely temporary and due to the fact that Obama doesn't believe that the United States needs the EU as much as it needs the United States, this explains why he believes that it can wait for him to it  in his second term.

Accepting Cablinasians

I agree with John McWhorter on this:

That is, Woods long ago declared himself to be “Cablinasian” to Oprah, and America has bought it. And it is of a piece with so much else: it’s the America whose youth have embraced hiphop as mainstream music. It’s the America who thrill to a 24 on television with not one but two black Presidents, and then elected a  real one.(...)Tiger Woods, in designating himself truly a mutt rather than Black By Default, is ahead of the curve. There are those who think he was supposed to declare himself “black” because of how, say, police might see him. But to do that would be to deny that his Thai mother contributed half of his genes and raised him – raised him, unable, as someone not Black American, to do so as a Black Mother. So, Tiger was brave enough to – brace yourself, Soul Patrol – be what he is. Two things. Not just black – and not even mainly black.
Something we can all agree on – in fifty years a lot of people will see it as odd that in our times that was seen as news. We’re mixing, a lot. There are now increasing numbers of self-avowedly “biracial” people – the days I knew as a kid when the black-white “mixed” kid was faced with having to “admit” that she was “black” when she was about thirteen, crying at forums where such issues were discussed out of ambivalence over disowning her non-black parent, are past. Tiger isn’t, from what is evident publicly, especially deep – but he’s prescient. He is the future, just as FDR, hardly deep himself, gave us Social Security, the FDIC and so much more. Sometimes we need to hearken to people who are not given to thinking too very much.

I'm wondering if it is possible to make the choice not to be black by defaut and to have a future in American politics.

Great writers, huge egos, and blind spots

I agree with this even though I happen to enjoy immensely both Martin Amis's and Philip Roth's writings (Roth is one of the greatest novelists. He should have received the Nobel prize for literature if he wasn't such a acerbic manly man, which just proves the fashionable and consensual nature of such prizes):

When writers like Amis, or Philip Roth – who declared this week that novel-reading would be a fringe activity in 25 years – make their apocalyptic proclamations about the state of publishing, it seems apparent that their pessimism may in fact be rather strongly influenced by anxiety that their new work no longer carries the kind of cultural clout they have grown used to, not because people aren't reading novels, but because people aren't reading their novels. And part of the reason for that may be that with the bulk of modern consumers of fiction being women, the particular brand of literary writing in which a particular aptitude for fellatio suffices as characterisation for a woman is less interesting, or resonant, than it once was.

The past, the present, and the future of feminine beauty

Wow ! It's official, women are doomed ! (Hat tip: Feminist philosophers )

Powerful narrative, useful resentment, and change

ahhhhh...the beauty of perceived powerlessness:

Most Middle Eastern states have very little incentive to work towards a two-state solution.  Within many Arab countries, domestic resentment can be channeled into anger at the Israelis and symbolic support for the Palestinians.  Why would governments in the region want to turn off that very useful spigot?

Twitter and race

Interesting stuff from  Caitlin Moran:

(...) my biggest discovery has been on the subject of race. An internet facility that allows connection with the whole world gives you a deeper and a richer understanding of different people and their problems. It makes you rethink things you had blithely taken for granted.
The big revelation I have had is that the phrase “mixed-race African-American” takes up 26 letters, from the available Twit-posting-limit of 140. The descriptor for a white American, meanwhile, would be simply “American”, a mere eight letters.This glaring disparity gives a Twittering advantage to white Americans — they have an extra 18 letters to communicate with. Mixed-race Americans, however, have to spend so many letters simply defining themselves that their actual announcements, jokes and links to duff YouTube clips are brutally curtailed. We can’t shillyshally around this — that is a racial disadvantage. In the interests of an equal and happy world, we have to find a snappier way to describe people’s ethnic heritage or Twitter will turn into a ghastly WASPy golf club and die of whiteness.
This is given added impetus because we now live in a post-Obama world. Obama is the most famous mixed-race African-American in history. Given how many times a day Obama is written about, discussed or name-checked, if we don’t tackle this “mixed-race African-American” problem soon, millions of people are going to be crippled by RSI. As the world is an increasingly mixed-race, mixed-nationality place — because of the unstoppable forces of a) increasingly cheap international travel and b) hot lust — it behoves us all, in our global brotherhood, to chip in with suggestions on this pressing linguistic problem.

I have to say that the fact that  Moran's observations about the linguistic and racial problems of twittering are interesting, they don't make me want to care because she is addressing mundane, pc, and fluffy issues, which come to the center just because they are modern even though they should force the technically aware crowd to the realization that some worldviews and categorizations are just too old and too odd for the new world.

Defending Anglo-Saxon capitalism

It's hard job, but somebody has to defend religiously the Anglo-Saxon economic model and way of life. I'm not sure that John Ibbitson does a good job doing it. I'm not even sure that there is such a thing as an Anglo-Saxon economic model anymore:

Anglo-Saxon capitalism – investment-friendly, export-oriented, low-taxed and minimally regulated – has been competing with its continental alternative – highly regulated, wealth-distributing and state-controlled – since the late 18th century. The Anglo-Saxon version is better. Britain launched, led and sustained the Industrial Revolution, and the United States launched, leads and sustains the Knowledge Revolution. There've been downturns, but we are wealthier and healthier than we'd have been with, say, France in charge.(...) We all want to live in a society where every child gets a good education, the poor have food and housing, and medical care is available for all. But we should also want to live in a society that encourages good ideas by making capital easily available and rewarding risk. Henry Ford and Bill Gates had good ideas. Because they were born in America, we live in their world. (...)  Anglo-Saxon isn't a race, it's an idea, which is why Mr. Sarkozy will berate Mr. Obama's Anglo-Saxon economics without irony. The recession will end, growth will resume and emerging economies will move closer to the Anglo-American model, because history has proved it works. This truth should be beyond debate, although it's a heck of a job getting some people to see it.

I wish Ibbitson's confidence was about more than a superiority complex and a blinding ideology. That said, I think Ibbitson misses the real issues because he wants to take some shots at the so-called European/French capitalism and way of life without addressing the center question of the direction and the sustainability of the current framework of globalization.

History is only history

Greg Waldmann reviews Robert Kagan’s The Return of History and the End of Dreams:

The Return of History and the End of Dreams is more of an extended essay than a book. It’s barely over a hundred pages long (though not priced accordingly), and its scope is limited. Kagan’s essay exists primarily to roll back the supposed complacency brought on the now two-decade old argument of Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man. It’s difficult to see the need for this. Terrorism and the ascendance of the world’s major autocracies have brought home reality with repeated hammer blows over the last ten years; the reader gets the feeling that Kagan needed something to set himself against in order to give cause for his essay and in order to structure its arguments.

[…]True to form, however, Kagan’s observations lead to overly generalized conclusions. He’s again constrained by space and the oppositional character of his work. We are not, Kagan says, entering a period of international convergence, but instead a “period of divergence.” Reality is a bit more muddled. The “twin realities of the present era” as he sees them can instead be viewed, in light of the economic and political convergence of the 1990s, as countervailing trends. The economic integration of the world still proceeds apace, Europe is still attempting (albeit in a fumbling way) political unity, and billions in the most disparate nations of the world still aspire to the benefits of democracy.

[...]This is sloppy work: the use of the indeterminate pronoun “they” ascribes undue emphasis on Americans’ knowledge of policy and their capacity for agency. It also – and not incidentally –unburdens governments of responsibility for the actions they take, and unburdens writers of their responsibility to think.

I find authors who pretend to use history to make sense of the present and to predict the future arrogant, which wouldn’t be a fatal flaw if they weren’t also as presumptuous and as flashy as psychics who make yearly flamboyant predictions about the future. The problem of course is that they haven’t read Hannah Arendt well to realize History is about the past and not the future and that it isn’t a predetermined force of what is happening or is about to happen. I have stopped taking seriously authors such as Kagan because their analysis is too pop and too fluffy to lead to substantive and constructive discussions.

Atheism as an identity

Dolan Cummings makes a good point about the desire of some atheists to “religionize” Atheism by establishing as an identity:

Of course, the resurgence of interest in atheism is a reaction to the perceived rise of religion, whether in the form of Islamic fundamentalism or US-style Christian conservatism. But in taking their cue from resurgent religions, atheists also adopt something of their inward-looking focus. From attempts to popularise the term ‘bright’ as a positive identity to calls for atheists to be included on the roster of BBC Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’, it seems that some want to establish atheism as an alternative, non-religious camp for people to belong to. But atheism itself ought to be the least interesting thing about atheists, who surely have various and often conflicting beliefs and passions of their own.

[…] The desire to establish atheism as an alternative identity is ultimately conservative. Rather than joining together with others who share a positive vision of the future, self-styled atheists define themselves against an external threat. Worse, it is no longer the conservatism of religion that worries non-believers, but its radicalism, its seemingly irrational passion. Where once religion was disdained as ‘the opium of the people’, today it is seen as more akin to the alcopop of the people: a dangerous and toxic influence that makes people behave in irrational ways.

Atheism loses its pertinence when it becomes religionlike and cheap. The point of saying No to religion is to remain faithful to the idea that it isn’t just the beliefs that are problematic, but the worshipping.

The future and a metaphor for Western civilization

Emanuel L. Paparella has written a good article in Ovi Magazine. It talks about the self, western philosophy, and the future. It is a fun and instructive read, which has a great conclusion:

Let us conclude with a brief reflection on this powerful metaphor of the whirlpool. Let us imagine it as representing a deterministic, horizontal, immanent future, devoid of any transcendence, the end of history so to speak, swallowing the past and the present. Let us further imagine Western Civilization as a wonderfully comfortable transatlantic ship full of technological gadgets and wonders unknowingly approaching the whirlpool in the middle of the night without a guiding compass or chart. Will it save itself by simply understanding the action of the whirlpool? Can that understanding be achieved via positivistic, rationalistic or real-politick paradigms devoid of the poetical? Is rationalism sufficient light unto itself to discern the danger of the whirlpool ahead?
The metaphor ought to liberate the reader's imagination and suggest many more existentially vital questions. For the preservation of our Western civilization may ultimately be determined not by the glib answers but by the quality of the imaginative questions we are capable of asking ourselves. They are like the indispensable rear-view mirror and sea charts.

Easy sex and L’amour à la française

Agnès Poirier laments the existence of the website Meetic that originates from France. Emetic enables permits people to find sexual partners without the pretension that the sex will lead to something more. Poirier wonders where the French romanticism has gone. Sugary excerpt:

It's a simple issue of supply and demand: pre-select candidates, test sales pitch, draw a shortlist, have a face-to-face interview, hire on the spot, dismiss without notice, voilà - a case of ultra-liberalism meets romance. And low-cost sex.

But perhaps the most unsettling thing about the whole affair is that Meetic is operating from France, supposedly the country of romance and gallantry. French films of the past century have all conveyed a grand idea of l'amour à la française: the penetrating gaze, the blushing, the first words, the long walks, impassioned silences, a steady crescendo of desire fuelled by months of courtship.

"I have no more time to waste trying to charm girls in cafes ... the process is too long and too arduous," says a 25-year-old Parisian man. "With Meetic ... I often score on the first date. Not long ago, when I was a teenager, girls kept me salivating for weeks. Forget it."

In the age of divorce and of fast love, people don’t want to have to work for a love or a relationship that will not last anyway. Courtship, seduction used to be fun for guys because it was a win and win and could use to a marriage marry to someone that was going to be content with being their Missus and not to ask for more. Women have the same problem except that hard work scares them less even though they are conscious of the fact that they may be getting the short end of the stick for they may find themselves divorced at an age where they will no longer be a catch. In order words, there is a crisis of expectations because men and women no longer trust each other to be nice and fair to each other now that it is less unacceptable for women to behave like men and to be more selfish and less altruistic. Thus, the issue may be that love and romance or rather the image that people have of them hasn’t caught on with the evolution of gender roles and with the ever-increasing crumbling of the traditions, which made marriage a safe institution. The point is that romance isn’t so much dead that it is expensive and arduous because it requires money or creativity, time, effort and especially a belief in love in a time where chaos and strife are the norms. L’amour à la française requires talent and efforts, which few people have to put on something that has been devalued because it is no longer self-sacrificing and everlasting. I am not appalled by the existence of sites such as Meetic because I think that they make the point sex and love are two different things and are in fact trying to answer one of the biggest question of this century can people live on sex alone without romance and yes,without l’amour.

Transcitizenry and immigration

John Sutherland has an interesting article in the Financial Times about immigration. He it from a different and a much-needed point of view, which shows that immigration is a complex issue even though some are trying to simplify by appealing to people’s fears and resentments. Sutherland defends the concept of transcitizenry to show that citizenship and nationality have become fluid concepts. Sugary excerpt:

Transcitizens, let’s call us. People, that is, with half- nationalities (or smaller fractions) in different countries. Not quite resident, not quite alien. In the US, the number of LPRs (legal permanent residents) increases at about 1m a year. Illegals probably arrive in much larger numbers. For them the home and away game that I, and other professionals like me, play, is impossible.

I honestly don’t know any more which is home and which is away. When I cross the yellow line I mysteriously forget whole swathes of my English telephone numbers and passwords and – like toast jumping out of the toaster – my American keywords and PINs magically install themselves. […] Transcitizenry, is I believe, centrally in the American grain. Uniquely and admirably so. More importantly, I would argue, it’s been as good for America as it has for transcitizen beneficiaries such as myself. When people such as me go to America, to join professional, business or academic communities, we’re not somehow flushed away. We are, I would maintain, more fully used and more useful in both places.

The problem is that the more fluid citizenship and nationality with the compression of time and space, the fiercer the backlash against this fluidity becomes. People want to hang on to outdated concepts to feel like they are still in control of their lives and to feel that they can still put their foot down by saying no to the changes, which they dislike. After all, isn’t it possible to summarize the immigration in the United States and in the rest of the world with two words: control and choice? Globalization has made everybody, third world’s citizen. Nowadays, everyone has to face the sad fact that their government, their state, their nation, their will may not be enough to make their life what they want it to be. The point isn’t that everybody is a victim now, but that people, like citizens of developing countries have had to accept for a long time: not only do foreigners exist, but they matter in the sense that globalization means that no human is really an island by making true the old eighties and cheesy adage, “we are the world.”

Jeffrey Sachs and Sisyphus

Vanity Fair has a portrait of Jeffrey Sachs in its July Issue in which it talks about his dream of ending poverty. I like Sacks because he reminds me in a way of Bernard Kouchner in his hay day ( before he chose to take the bone, which Sarkozy threw him) and because it is refreshing to see a grown and cultured man who still has unwithered ideals and big dreams. Of course, the realist in me believes that he won’t succeed in making poverty history, but at the same the fact that he is trying inspires me because Sachs is doing something this world needs and that is the willingness to dream big and to as Sisyphus take on great tasks even if they seem meaningless and useless because they will fail. Sugary excerpt:

According to his account in The End of Poverty, Sachs's focus on extreme poverty began in 1995, when, for the first time, he traveled to sub-Saharan Africa: "Never, not even in the highlands of Bolivia, where illness is rife, had I confronted so much illness and death." Early in his career, when he was thinking about ways of improving people's lives, Sachs had been convinced of the power of open markets, free trade, deregulation, privatization, and fiscal discipline. Now, perhaps in response to this first trip to Africa, he started to promote benevolent intervention.

Some people believe that Sachs's crusade to wipe out poverty is the direct result of his failure in Russia, that he's atoning for his public errors of judgment and compensating for them. Sachs dismisses that simpleminded theory out of hand. As far as he is concerned, his work in the developing world is not all that different from his earlier work in Bolivia and Poland. In an e-mail, he explains to me that his goal has always been "to take on complex challenges and bring to bear expertise in economics and other disciplines to find workable solutions." What I think he means is this: it doesn't matter whether you're using shock therapy to save a nation's economy or prescribing interventions for a village to save human beings. The messianic pattern is the same.

The French Left, the future, and sculpture

Jules Treneer has a thorough, but in my opinion somewhat biased reading of the political landscape and of the state of the French Left. Although, I disagree with much of his premises and with his slanted analysis of the French election, I agree with his conclusion that the French Left hasn’t adapted to the post-Soviet world. It is still trying to fight the old and settled dispute between capitalism and whatever else without ever acknowledging that this issue has been settled by the fall the Soviet Union and globalization. That doesn’t mean that TINA (There is no alternative) prevails, but that the solution isn’t in the past and its dead, dumb, naïve, and sterile ideologies, but that it must be invented by imagining a different future. Sugary excerpt:

Now, after this third successive presidential defeat, the socialists are in disarray, and a leadership struggle is in the offing. Various camps will vie for control, either to “modernize” or to return the party to its roots, while the battles over trade (a.k.a. globalization) and Europe (a.k.a. globalization) that have riven the party will rage on. How these challenges are addressed will demonstrate whether France is a laboratory or a museum of the left. How to straddle the distance between a pro-union anti-globalist left and one that is social democratic and market-friendly?

Before we follow this question too far, it’s worth considering the possibility that the question itself may prove irrelevant, since it assumes that the present global situation is sustainable and must therefore either be resisted or accommodated. That assumption may prove wrong. The present paradigm, which began when the fall of the Berlin Wall released an enormous pool of pent-up labor and demand, is an era of increasing trade and an increasingly interlocked global economy.

The French left is going through what the American left went through after the loss of Jimmy Carty and the succession of two Republican Presidents, a transition period due to an identity crisis. It has to adapt to the fact that the French electorate has steered to the Right because it seems more inspiring and more able not only to protect the French, but also to fight back against its enemies, which Sarko pointed out were responsible for the so called French decline: those who didn’t work, who didn’t love French, who refused to integrate French society and who were content to live on the backs of the early rising and hard working French. The greatest magic trick, which the French right pulled during this election was to make something new and glamorous of what was left of Chiraquism and Villepinism by making the French feel that they weren’t responsible and that their country could be great again if they had a superman i.e. Sarko who was willing to kick out of the roaches who were spoiling its grandeur. The left didn’t have any magic because all of its unresolved issues and its unwillingness to look anywhere but to the left broke the golden wings of Ségolène Royal.

Is the French Left withered and almost dead? Yes, but is it over? No because the French to the contrary of Americans aren’t dreamers at heart but sculptors in the sense that they sense that they always come a moment when they stop to dream to scream, to complain, and to  ask for something, which they can touch, feel, and mold. Sarkozy right now is Rodin. He has painted a masterpiece, which may last or simply end up like much modern art after a while be considered to be overvalued because it is fluffy. The left needs a Camille Claudel. I think she is Ségolène Royal, but what is more important is that the new leader be willing to accept madness (figuratively speaking) in order to reconstruct the French Left and to sculpt its own masterpiece.

Men and Feminine chic

The Financial Times had an odd article last week about the increased “feminization” of men fashion. The article showed that actually being “girly men” to use the Governator’s favorite expression is what’s in nowadays in the world of men fashion. Sugary excerpt:

“Whether gay or straight, men are getting more adventurous, but it takes courage to wear something ‘feminine’,” concedes Joe Casely-Hayford, designer for Gieves & Hawkes, whose Gieves range includes “Quentin Crispian” scarves and a nice male take on the classic country lady’s twin-set. “There is an opening up of traditional male roles and that’s coming through in the way men present themselves. Admittedly, this tends to be for younger men who are less tied to tradition and more influenced by the recent 1980s music scene revival, during which styling was generally more feminine. But I remember Rod Stewart in the ‘70s wearing chiffon scarves, despite his macho football fan attitude.”

Call it the Russell Brand Effect, after the stand-up comic and fan of skinny-fit denim, neck-scarves and Byronic shirts (pictured right) who also manages to maintain a reputation as a Lothario.

According to Stacey Smith, men’s buyer for London fashion independent Matches, “Femininity is filtering down from fey celebrities like Razorlight’s Johnny Borrell to the mainstream, and the female/masculine barriers in fashion are starting to come down. Men are more willing to experiment with the idea of femininity in fashion. Look how many will wear colour now. Rugby-playing estate agents now come in and are interested in clothes that verge on the feminine – clothes that two years ago they’d have laughed at.”

Andrew Wiles, communications director of decidedly masculine brand Dunhill (which this season has some very fine gauge cardigans that “a woman could wear comfortably”), says: “Femininity in men’s wear is a trend that’s been coming through and has reached its peak. There is a market for it: younger consumers, footballers, guys in rock bands, models – men in industries with the money to spend on items they may wear once, who need clothes to individualise them, and to whom the stand-out qualities of such feminine pieces appeal. But, to be honest, it doesn’t make for the kind of items that most men would buy.”

Surprisingly, I find myself insulted by that article and I’m going to try to explain even though I probably won’t do it very well. I resent the idea that femininity is first a fashion tool in the sense that men can use it, own it, mold it, and perfect it. It leads to me wonder if the implicit message isn’t the unsettling idea that only men can make femininity chic by bringing it not in the mainstream, but in the closed arenas of power and of masculinity. I have nothing against “girly men” except the fact that they are actually called “girly” and that the fashion is femininity as an accessory to make them hip and cool. Of course, it is acceptable for men to take fashion seriously but must they make that daring adventure in the world of chic an assault the forceful conquest of something, which I as a woman don’t want them to touch. The question here isn’t one of sectarianism or of separation for I don’t believe that gender is everything. What are at issue are the perpetuation and indeed the strengthening of the enduring stereotype that femininity when it applies to women can never be the equal of masculinity.

Harvey Mansfield, politics, and manliness

Harvey Mansfield was this year’s Jefferson Lecture at the national Endowment for the Humanities. He talked at great length about politics and how about the role that humanities can play today in the understanding of politics. Here is a short excerpt of his lecture:

Politics is not an exchange between the bargaining positions of a buyer and a seller in which self-interest is clear and the result is either a sale or not, and without fuss. Self-interest, when paramount, cools you off and calms you down; thumos pumps you up. That we get angry if we feel cheated, or that we succumb to the charm of salesmanship, shows that self-interest does not explain even commercial transactions. More than a small measure of ego enters into the behavior of those who pride themselves on calculation. In politics there is bargaining, as in commerce, but with a much greater degree of self-importance. People go into politics to pick a fight, not to avoid one. Self-interest tends towards peace, and if it could replace the thumos in our souls it would accomplish universal peace. Meanwhile, however, people want to stand for something, which means opposing those who stand for something else. In the course of opposing they will often resort to insults and name-calling, which are normal in politics though never in your interest. The demand for more civility in politics today should be directed toward improving the quality of our insults, seeking civility in wit rather than blandness.

Philip Kennicott wrote about this lecture in the Washington Post on Wednesday and made this great point about Mansfield’s emphasis of thumos:

So thumos is no quaint philosophical idea borrowed from Plato and dusted off for the humanities crowd at the Jefferson Lecture. It is the underlying sense behind an almost nihilistic view of politics as the plaything of great men, a form of play that is more exhilarating and interesting and compelling to scholars such as Mansfield than the rusty old rule of law that might constrain greatness.

That is precisely what is bothersome about Mansfield's view of politics and of society. He makes politics a contact sport where what matters is power, anger, and other unashamed expressions of manliness. If Mansfield is right then we are back to the Hobbsian state of nature where power (which Mansfield equates to greatness) is the sole thing, which matters, and equality becomes  a notion that is for suckers, the weak. Manliness becomes the norm because it is about accepting nature and burping when one wants to burp. Laws and ethics don’t matter because they try to make natural and normal expressions of anger unmanly.

Scapegoating multiculturalists

Johann Hari argues that multiculturalism is betraying Muslim women by defending unacceptable customs and behaviors. For Hari, multiculturalism isn’t helping immigrants, but making social outcasts by giving them the right to refuse to integrate in the name of tolerance. Sugary excerpt:

Multiculturalists believe they are defending immigrants. But in reality, they are betraying at least 55 percent of them - the women and the gays. It is multiculturalists, for example, who are the biggest champions of the government's massive expansion of 'faith schools', where children will be segregated according to parental superstition and often taught the most literalist and cruel strain of a 'faith'.
What will girls and gay pupils be taught there? Will they have Sura 4, verse 34 drilled into them, along with the passages from the hadith where Mohammed calls for gay people to be executed? We know Catholic schools often push the most vile aspects of their faith at children; why should Muslim schools be different?

My only question is whether all integration failures can be placed on the shouldres of multiculturalists that is whether multiculturalism hasn’t become an easy scapegoat  for the failures of multi-ethnic societies to integrate their society. After, many of those who are arguing multiculturalism are the same who yesterday were for separation and segregation in the name of purity and who are today arguing integration doesn’t just have to do with banning the unacceptable and the intolerable, but with “disinfecting” immigrants in order to make them clean and less visible.

Sovereignty, politics, and change

Frank Furedi reviews Politics Without Sovereignty: A Critique Of Contemporary International Relations, a collection of essays edited by Christopher J Bickerton, Philip Cunliffe and Alexander Gourevitch . He argues that sovereignty has to be defended against cosmopolitanism and other kinds of assaults because it is essential to politics. Sugary excerpt:

The idea of sovereignty is also derided today on the basis that it’s simply a very bad idea. Some proponents of cosmopolitanism celebrate an abstract human rights-based vision of world affairs that ‘transcends’ national interest. Others argue that the problems of the twenty-first century are global in character, and thus require global solutions. From this standpoint, it is often argued that national governments only get in the way of international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that are trying to do the right thing.

Rising numbers of disenchanted Western elites are also aiming their fire at sovereignty. They believe that the behaviour and actions of national governments – particularly national governments ‘over there’ – should be subordinated to the higher imperative of a human rights agenda. They prefer agendas that are drawn up by international bodies and NGOs which are not constrained by the exigencies of democratic accountability to a politically illiterate electorate (as many now view voters around the world).

These various assaults on sovereignty should be resisted. However imperfect the ideal of sovereignty, it at least contains the potential for expressing people’s democratic aspirations, for embodying human subjectivity.

I wonder if sovereignty is a concept that can only be limited to nations and whether it is more imaginative to argue that the world needs to remain as it is or to say that it needs to evolve as do concepts such as sovereignty. After it may be possible that no matter how much some may be to hold on to sovereignty as it has been define until now that it may not be able to survive in the world as it is.

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, and Ethics

Mark Skousen approves of Ayn Rand’s liberty message in “Atlas Shrugged” and of her attempts to counter the negative image of big business, but disapproves of her ethics because she defends, in his opinion greed and selfishness. He argues that Atlas Shrugged has a mixed message because “Its object – to restore man to his rightful place in a free society – is wholesome. But its ethical basis – an inversion of the Christian values that predicate authentic capitalism – poisons its teachings.” Sugary excerpt:

To be sure, Rand makes a key point about altruism. A philosophy of sacrificing for others can lead to a political system that mandates sacrificing for others. That, Rand shows with frightening clarity, leads to a dysfunctional society of deadbeats and bleeding-heart do-gooders (Rand calls them "looters") who are corrupted by benefits and unearned income, and constantly tax the productive citizens to pay for their pet philanthropic missions. According to Rand, they are "anti-life." But is the only alternative to embrace the opposite, Rand's philosophy of extreme self-centeredness? Must we accept her materialist metaphysics in which, as Whittaker Chambers wrote in 1957, "Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world"?

No, there is another choice. If society is to survive and prosper, citizens must find a balance between the two extremes of self-interest and public interest.

The myth of the flattening of world

Pankaj Ghemawat explains in an article in Foreign Policy “why the world isn’t flat” as Tom Friedman and other “globalization triumphalists” argue. He writes that only a part of the world is integrated while the other part isn’t and has been left on the outside of the integrating process cause by Globalization. Technology has flattened the world or made it more global, but has simply made us more wired. Thus, the world is not fully globalized, but semi-globalized and borders and bridges still matters, which means that Friedman and others have exaggerated the level of globalization and internationalization to be able to argue that the world is flat. However, even if Ghemawat questions the flattening of the world today, he doesn’t question the fact that it will eventually become flat even though he argues that the future of globalization is fragile. Sugary excerpt:

Geographical boundaries are so pervasive, they even extend to cyberspace. If there were one realm in which borders should be rendered meaningless and the globalization proponents should be correct in their overly optimistic models, it should be the Internet. Yet Web traffic within countries and regions has increased far faster than traffic between them. Just as in the real world, Internet links decay with distance. People across the world may be getting more connected, but they aren’t connecting with each other. The average South Korean Web user may be spending several hours a day online—connected to the rest of the world in theory—but he is probably chatting with friends across town and e-mailing family across the country rather than meeting a fellow surfer in Los Angeles. We’re more wired, but no more “global.”

In praise of scepticism

Stuart Sims answers Paul Cliteur by defending the postmodernists against the claim that they are relativists and that they contribute to the decline of Europe and Western civilization by advocating Multiculturalism without defending strongly western values and excusing inexcusable intolerance. He defends scepticism and argues that it has a major role to play in the multiculturalism debate and in the evolution of Western society. Sugary excerpt:

I'd like to make the case for a role for scepticism within the debate on multiculturalism, and also to defend the reputation of postmodern thought after what I consider to be unfair treatment at the hands of Paul Cliteur. If multiculturalism can be persuaded to take scepticism on board, and to acknowledge that all religions and belief systems have a history of scepticism that can be activated against their tendency towards dogmatism, then it can still contribute to constructing "'a new European story." The problem isn't Islam, or Enlightenment, or multiculturalism, or postmodernism, or relativism: it's dogmatism, and unless that is addressed we're treating symptoms not causes.

France and its Muslims

Stéphanie Giry has written a review of “Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France” written by by Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse in Prospect magazine. The book contradicts the assertions that France is becoming Muslim because of a  Muslim population, which is increasing while the “real” French population is decreasing. Sugary excerpt:

The problem of the re-Islamisation of disaffected young French Muslims seems particularly daunting, especially when there is no quick fix for the broader economic problems that afflict them and the rest of France. Of course, as Laurence and Vaisse point out, the revival of faith need not lead to radicalism. But it can. And when it has, a report by the International Crisis Group suggested last spring, it has been because hardline Salafi groups have filled the vacuum left after Muslim civic groups created in the 1980s and 1990s failed to mobilise their constituents. This is a bleak observation, but it carries an implicit recommendation: get young Muslims involved in mainstream politics.

Britain and Globalization

Open democracy has an interesting debate based on an Economist's article on Britain and the age of Globalization, which attempts to answer the question of whether Globalization is good for Britain and for its future. It is worth reading.

Immigration and Integration mean adaptation

“Practicing Muslims who live by the word of the Koran and the Koranic books — of course they limit their own opportunities. A lot of people who live like me, or practicing Muslims who respect that religion is a private matter, have had it easier than those who think religion should be part of a larger society. […] I need to pray five times a day because my religion says so, O.K., which employer will accept that? Or, 'My child shouldn't take part in music class, because my religion questions this.' O.K., then we have a problem. […] I would like to know what is happening in our society that makes families want to put a veil on our children. Maybe we don't need a law. Maybe we need something else so that people don't feel so insecure that they need to manifest their religion by using their children. […]We have a society that has failed to adapt to new times. We don't offer people their rights, but we are also unclear about their obligations. So people end up in a kind of no man's land, where they are neither Swedes nor Turks nor Congolese.” Nyamko Sabuni, Sweden’s Minister for integration and gender equality.

The criminalization of youth

Bryony Gordon addressed the fact that it is very difficult being young in today's modern society because adults assume the worst and are less willing to forgive youthful mistakes because they have forgotten that a child isn't an adult. Money Quote:

If youths are behaving any worse than before — and, according to the penal reform charity Nacro, Britain's youth crime rates have dropped 27 per cent in the past 10 years — then it is grown-ups who are to blame for having the audacity to demand respect from teens while at the same time disrespecting them. That might make me want to commit an act of violence on the nearest person in authority, too. And has anybody ever questioned that kids might be carrying knives because they are scared of each other, thanks namely to the preposterous way in which they are presented in the media?

Reviewing Mark Steyn

Josef Joffe wrote a incisive review of Mark Steyn's America Alone, which I am planning to read as soon as I can get a borrowed copy for I don't want to spend money on that junk (hat tip: Damnaition) . He makes interesting points about Mark Steyn's thesis, which is that Europe is being islamized and the survival of Western civilizatin depends on solely America, including the one that its biggest problem is that it is totally disconnected from the reality not only in Europe, but also in America. Here is an excerpt of the review:

This book is a relentlessly funny and felicitous polemic, but as in any polemic, its sparkling insights don't quite add up to a watertight brief. Sentences are honed to the sharpest, wittiest point, but, in the end, they leave you breathless and with a sense of du trop. You begin to scratch your head once your look past the sheer delight of reading.

Eurabia? There are only 20 million self-righteous and embittered Muslims in Europe— and 430 million soi-disant Euro-weenies. It will take a while before the former overwhelm the latter — a couple of hundred years at least. Meanwhile, these secular and Christian folks are not amoebae or lemmings, driven to their demise by forces they neither understand nor control. If  September 11, 2001, was no wake-up call, July 7, 2005, in Britainwas, and so were the murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam and a spate of foiled terror attacks since then.

Those Euros are beginning to see multiculturalism as an unforeseen passport to "parallel universes" in their inner and outer cities; they are taking a hard look at their mosques, and what is taught in them; and they are tightening up on immigration. The new buzzword is "integration," which is a more correct moniker for "assimilation."

Nor is  America as exceptional as Mr. Steyn would have us believe. Berkeley is more like  Berlin than  Boisewhen it comes to the siren call of multiculturalism and "Otherism." There is altogether too much guilt and too little pride in the West. But what a magnificent civilization it remains. It may run out of babies, but will it also run out of spunk?

Food for thought: The art of war

“So how do we win a global war? We won the Cold War by waiting out our communist opponents. We could lose the war in Vietnam and still win the broader Cold War. We could stalemate in Korea without losing the fight against communism. Communist ideology was bankrupt, and if we denied them resources (as we did by funding anti-communist forces around the globe and rolling back communism under President Reagan), we would be successful in the long run.

That strategy will not work with fundamentalist Islam. Fundamentalist Islam is not an ideology that will crumble from within. It demands total religious obeisance of its practitioners, regardless of material hardships incurred. And anything but total replacement of fundamentalist Islam by another, friendlier ideology is seen as a victory by the fundamentalists.” Ben Shapiro, “Will we ever win another war?”

The French CNN

France 24, the French CNN is starting to broadcast today and Jacques Chirac has emphasized the fact that it was created to stop Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism. If there is something that I dislike the most about Chirac it is precisely his inability to realize that the reason is why “Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism”(I don’t like that expression) exists in not necessarily that Anglo-Saxons have a better culture, but that they know how to sell. They don't consider cultural products to be something that should be available only to the few, but to everybody. The goal of France should be to want the nobility of its culture to be not only widely available, but also to be alive, that is capable to change, to grow, and yes to take something from other cultures.

World Aids day

Today is World Aids day and unfortunately, I think that with time, aids has become just a simple disease in spite of the fact that it may decimate a large part of the African population and of the fact that some segments of the population are still at risk. My hope is that people realize that Aids is creating an emergency not only in African countries, but also in countries around the world and that we still have to fight hard not only to find a cure, but to enable those who cannot have pay for the drugs, which enable people to survive this disease to have access to them.

The video du matin: Feminism is at the roots of all evils

The end of the cedar revolution?

Juan Cole argues that the assassination of Pierre Gemayel is yet another example of the Bush's foreign policy and of its "dishonest rhetoric of democratization". Money quote:

The problem is that when you crush the Pushtuns of Afghanistan, who traditionally ruled the country, they have means of hitting back (ask the Canadian troops in Qandahar). When you crush the Sunni Arabs of Iraq, who had traditionally ruled they have ways of organizing a guerrilla movement and acting as spoilers of Bush's new Kurdish-Shiite axis in Baghdad. When you crush Hamas even after they won the elections in early 2006, they have means of continuing to struggle.
In Lebanon, Bush egged on the pro-Hariri movement against the Syrians and their allies. Then he egged on Israel to bomb the Shiites of southern Lebanon (and, mysteriously, the rest of Lebanon, too). So he tried to create the March 14th alliance around Hariri as the winners who take all in Lebanon.
So obviously there will be trouble about this. Everything Bush touches turns to ashes, bombings, assassinations. He doesn't know how to compromise and he doesn't know how to influence his neo-colonial possessions so that they can compromise.

I wonder if what is happening right now wasn't unavoidable given the fact that the only thing, which the Lebanon War conflict accomplish was the weakening of the Siniora Government and through it the empowerment of Syria, Hezbollah, and Iran. The problem is that there are no course of action, which can temperate the situation, which doesn't involve the eating of humble pie by the administration. However, we know from experience that humility isn't something, which this administration is good at demonstrating, especially when it still has the ability of framing the debate in absolute terms to avoid making the difficult decision of bargaining with the devil to avoid the explosion of the region.

Food Thought: Her name is Ségolène, Ségolène Royal

“The choice of the French socialists to copy Britain's Labour party and go for a one person, one vote selection process, in contrast to the back-room deals and manoeuvres of choosing a presidential candidate by means of a party congress decision, has been vindicated. Royal - known simply as Ségo (pronounced "sago", as in the pudding) - has captured an enthusiastic support among party members, including 60,000 new or returned members who signed up on the net for just 20 euros to take part in the vote. […] The Royal victory - and her name itself may be worth half a million votes, as a French president is the closest the world has to an elected monarch - is also a big defeat for the old way of doing politics on the French left. […] The important winner is the notion that a woman can occupy the post of president of France, which combines and concentrates state and political power in a way that no other major western democracy does. This is not happenstance as when Margaret Thatcher emerged from nowhere in 1975 to seize the Tory leadership from Ted Heath, nor the similar putsch organised by Angela Merkel against the tired Kohl machine in German Christian democracy earlier this century. Royal's emergence is the fruit of 20 years' effort by French socialists to promote women and women's issues in politics.” Denis MacShane, “Casino Royal.”

The video du jour: fraud, elections and democracy

I'm neither a fabulist nor a conspiracy theorist so I don't look for reasons to believe that people are going to steal elections and that votes won't be counted. I believe of course in dirty tricks, which would make partisans call voters to dissuade them from voting or misdirecting. However, I am a bit jittery about electronic voting because for one it is new and because as this clip shows it makes it easier to disrupt elections or to try to steal them.

Patriotism and dissent : wanting the US to win and wanting it to be good

It's 1945 all over again. I know this argument is usually made by those who argue that we are in the midst of World War III and that Islamism is fascism, but those aren't arguments I'm about to make. I saw Lynn Cheney putting Wolf Blitzer and CNN on trial for questioning the Bush administration and not shutting up as they did in the first years since 9/11. She asked him, “Do you want the US to win?” as to imply that nobody has the right to question the actions of the United States and that anybody who dares to do that is unpatriotic and wants Bin Laden to become the president of the United States. When I listened to Lynn Cheney, I understood why Colin Powell was no longer a member of the Bush administration and why many conservatives who don't have arguments have decided to revert to old tactics of calling those who disagree with them Islamic sympathizers, cultural relativists, and people who don't understand that winning is everything. In short, to those people, we're not in 2006 but in 1945 and the US is fighting the Nazi and those who dare to ask questions, to say “Quo Vadis?” or “I don't agree” are Nazi sympathizers are like those people who thought that the US should be involved in World War II. But that of course is a ridiculous argument, which is solely made in an effort to divert us from the real question, which is Winning everything and does be an American and a patriot mean to shut up and sing or do whatever else you are doing while the grownups fight the battle and protect you. It is important before answering that question to make the following point to show that the History analogy that is made with World War II is wrong and purposely misleading. The United States waited before it was attacked to enter World War II, Roosevelt knew about the concentration camps, that Jews were dying, and nevertheless he thought the United States didn't have the right to be involved in a bloody war between European powers. At that time in the US history, those wanted the US to get involved that were in the minority and that were protesting the fact that the US was standing of the sidelines while Hitler was conquering Europe. I'm using that example simply to show that the majority isn't always right and that the minority can be right and that even if it isn't it plays an important role in forcing power to justify its action and not to assume that we are in dictatorship where discourse, justification, convincing the people is unnecessary.

Winning isn't everything for a democracy especially for one as the United States which is leading the world and which has inspired the world with great ideals such as the one that the people have the right to happiness and their consent is essential. Lynne Cheney, Bill O'Reilly and all the others are trying to change America, because they can't stand dissent. More importantly, they fear a rational and calm discussion, which would force them to justify their point of view that America should do everything to win including betraying its principle because they know that the only way for them to convince is to stifle debate and to appeal to people's fears and to the worst of all of us. Therefore, they ask in an indignant, stand offish and dismissing manner, "Do you want the US to win?" as some parents who are tired their petulant children ask them "Do you love me?" when the child is asking stubbornly "But why?” In a way to them, we must see our leaders as omnipotent parents who are dealing with all the shit (forgive me for using that word) that there is in the world, and who are willing to get dirty so that the people can continue to live peaceful lives innocently. Their argument is that in return for them protecting us, we should shut up, not ask questions, and just be grateful that they are doing what needs to be done. Well, I can't agree with that because the people are children and leaders aren't parents. In a democracy, the people are all grown up who are entitled to ask those who govern them question and to ask them to be accountable for their actions. It isn't speaking against power in difficult times that is un-American, it is shutting up, presuming that power knows best, and kneeling down when important questions need to be asked and answered. After all, America was created because a weak group of people dared to ask England "why are you taxing us when we don't have representation?" and dared to go to war when answers weren't given to their question. They understood that democracy couldn’t work by treating the people, the governed, as children who can't understand the difficult issues of their world and who therefore should not be allowed to ask questions and to dissent.

If the Bush administration and its supporters can take dissent and can't answer difficult and important questions without answering as a way of avoiding them, "Do you want the US to win" then the American people should be worry because it shows that they don't have any answers and that their actions are motivated by an ideology that is so repressive and so inflexible that it can't deal with reality.

Food for thought: Intolerance, hypocrisy, or simply fear?

“After all, if politicians and journalists in the West wanted to draw critical attention to groups of people wearing costumes that set them apart, that convey a message of separateness, they could point out Old Order Mennonites, Sikhs, Orthodox Jews, or maybe even the outfits worn by the Pope and Dalai Lama. What gives the narrative about the niqab its traction in the media is that it is the thin edge of the wedge in a critique of Muslims in general, not just those who wear the niqab. The question that is being asked, in a highly coded way to be sure, is whether Muslims constitute an alien presence in our society. Can they be relied upon to fit in as immigrants, to assimilate and become members of our society? Or will they be a dangerous, separate people, and even a source of terrorist recruits for attacks on us, with repeats of attacks like the suicide bombings in London in the summer of 2005?” James Laxer, “Veiling Intolerance in Liberal Discourse.”